Locaweb Servicos De Internet SA

BOVESPA:LWSA3

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Operator]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to LWSA's Q1 2024 Earnings Conference. Joining us today are CEO, Fernando Cirne; and CFO and IRO, Rafael Al Chamas. During the Q&A session, we will also be joined by the company's senior management.

This conference is being streamed online via Zoom webinar with simultaneous interpretation into English and will be available for replay at ri.locaweb.com.br. You can download the slide deck for this presentation at the same websites Results Center under the Financial Information tab.

The reported figures are denominated in Brazilian real and have been calculated following Brazilian standard accounting practices as per the statements, guidelines and interpretations issued by the Brazilian accounting pronouncements Committee.

Before moving on, we'd like to mention that the statements contained in this document regarding LWSA's business prospects, operational and financial forecasts as well as future growth estimates are merely projections and, as such, are based solely on its management's outlook for the business. This outlook relies heavily on market conditions, the performance of the Brazilian economy, the industry and international markets and therefore, may change without prior notice.

Unless otherwise stated, all variations and rounded off figures here presented have been calculated in thousands of Brazilian reals. The business performance report includes both accounting and nonaccounting data such as organic and pro forma operating and financial results as well as projections based on the company's management's expectations. The nonaccounting data have not been reviewed by independent auditors. [Operator Instructions]

I will now turn over to Mr. Fernando Cirne, who will begin the presentation, followed by Mr. Rafael Chamas. Please, Mr. Cirne, you may proceed.

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

Thank you, Paolo. Welcome, everyone, to LWSA's Q1 2024 Earnings Conference. I'd like to start by thanking our clients and analysts in the entire market, which has been supporting us to grow the company. But before I begin the presentation, I'd like to say a few words about what's going on in the Porto Alegre region and the entire state of Rio Grande Do Sul, voicing our solidarity to the local population.

As we all know, there is a significant number of our companies located in that area of the country, which makes it even more important for us to help and devote our attention to what's been going on there? So I think it's important to talk a little bit about what we've been doing, starting with our work toward the population and more specifically, our own associates. We've mapped out all the LWSA's associates in the area that have been impacted. We know precisely who has been impacted more dramatically and those who have been more mildly affected.

In either case, we are mobilizing our efforts to help them, which obviously involves Locaweb to help these people. But also, we have been rallying up Locaweb's own associates to join forces to help our colleagues in the Rio Grande do Sul area. So it's an effort -- a combined effort that joins both our associates and the entire Rio Grande do Sul community.

This has been very effective. And what we can do and what we feel the responsibility to do is this seeing as we feel so fortunate and so thankful for the local community. And I think it's very important to keep our operations up and running fully so, both in terms of the services we provide and the support we provide to our customers.

So once again, we'd like to say we stand in solidarity with the population of Rio Grande do Sul. We continue to monitor and doing whatever we can to support the community with all our efforts.

So moving on with our presentation. On Slide #3, I start by mentioning the takeaway messages we'd like you to leave with after this presentation. And these are 3 very strong messages. First of all, to say that the company's fundamentals remain extremely sound. Second, our margins have significantly increased. And last but not least, I'd like to address the company's significant growth.

Moving on to Slide 4. I'd like to talk a little bit about the 4 main operating indicators for the company. These are growing in the double digits, which is very important for us. First of them is the ecosystem GMV, which has grown by nearly 20% versus 1 year ago coming to nearly BRL 6 billion in the first quarter of 2024. Very healthy performance.

Our subscriber base has also been increasing. And as we usually say, we are sowing the seeds for the future because we're not just growing in our ARPU and the average ticket, but we're also growing our installed basis. So it's very important for us that our platform subscription has also increased by 21.7%.

Moving on to Slide 5. We have our own store GMV, which has gone up by 17.8% versus 1 year ago. And lastly, our payment operations whose TPV has gone up by 17.3% as well. All of this is to say that the operational fundamentals of the company continue to grow, which is very important for our operations and shows that we continue to grow and even outperform Brazilian e-commerce.

Moving on to Slide #6. We also address our margins and the company's margin growth. On the EBITDA side, precisely, our adjusted EBITDA grew by 20.7% versus Q1 '23 from BRL 50.5 million to BRL 61 million, 2.3 percentage points higher from 16.8% to 19% this quarter. And this is truly in line with what happens in the last quarter. There's been substantial margin growth, both in the previous quarter and this last quarter. And I'll be talking a little bit more about how our maturity connects with this, but our margins continue to grow versus the same period of last year. And another very important data point is our net profit. We moved from BRL 6.5 million to BRL 24.5 million in 1-year period, growing by 5.5 percentage points.

Going back to Q4, I mentioned then that our commitment when it comes to the company's metrics was to have our net profit outgrowing our EBITDA and have our EBITDA outgrowing our revenues. And that's exactly what we've been doing. You noticed that our adjusted EBITDA has grown nearly fourfold outgrowing our revenue. So we continue to grow our profitability, which is not to say that the next phase for the company will not include a focus on growth, but we think target-wise, we talk about a growth expansion strategy that has been effective.

Moving on to Slide 7. A little bit about our margins. So where has this margin growth come from? Well mostly our operational leverage followed by the realization of synergies, we have been working very diligently in simplifying our operations and merging the operations of some of our margins. And there's still a lot of room for that to continue moving forward. So much so that we brought a new executive Otavio, who's been working very hard on the new structure and the reorganization and the streamlining of our structure.

It's also important to talk about the longevity or continuity of this. You know that our margins have grown significantly in the last quarter, but regardless of the lower seasonal period in the first quarter seeing as there is no holiday season, there's no Black Friday, we're talking about 39% this quarter. So a proportionately better revenue point, growing about 2.3 percentage points versus the first quarter of 2023 as well.

Another important point, this margin growth has taken place without prejudice to the company's overall growth. Is there still room to grow our margins? Well, I'd say yes. Our operational leverage is still a reality. Many of our acquired operations continue to grow in the high double digits, which is significant indicator of that margin growth. Some of our operations are being restructured, which is the case of Squid.

And we have a slide that is fully dedicated to Squid moving forward and also the continued organizational simplification which will remain in place for a while still. So we are very much comfortable with the continuity of our margin growth and the possibility of continuing to see gains in that sense moving forward.

So on to Slide #8. Let's talk about growth. It's very important for us to accurately assess the company to break down our growth in different building blocks. So looking at the consolidated growth always comparing to the same period of last year. Our consolidated growth, excluding Squid and also our commerce growth, excluding Squid. We'll be talking about Squid later, but our consolidated growth, excluding Squid is up 6.3%. We know that the next step for us is to do precisely that. We want to grow even further, and I'll be talking about that, but it's important to break the figure down to accurately assess how the company is doing.

So moving a little bit further, how has the company been doing in that sense? I've mentioned this last quarter, but I think it's important to show where we stand and where we've come from. So very quickly, we had our pre-IPO phase where we were mostly a hosting and domain company. We had the post-IPO period where we acquired several different companies very quickly over 14 acquisitions. And with that, we managed to grow our share of the market. We followed a very accurate M&A strategy.

And following that, in the third stage, we consolidated our ecosystem, recovered our margins and integrated our M&As, consolidating our PMS ecosystem in Brazil. We are now in a time of transition because all of that took place in a very short time span. It was a 4-month period essentially where we acquired the companies, grew our revenue. We're now recovering our margins and that we've sown the seeds to start growing with 2 examples such as Wake and our financial services, we have our executives. We have our operations at a go-to-market stage. And now we need to mature those operations further to be able to achieve what we call the future in terms of margin growth, which will continue into the future, as I said before, what we're calling the increase in profitability, but what we will reap later on is larger organic growth, which is something that we need, and we know there's room for that. And then we'll start monetizing the investments we've already made in our ecosystem.

So that's a lot of change in a short time span, but we understand there's still room to grow and that's what we're working on. And we are confident this is going to materialize after all of our investments. So I think this makes our desire very clear and also makes it clear how the company sees every stage in its history so far.

On to Slide 10, a little bit about our Squid operation. So why did we decide to open up Squid a little bit more? And even split Squids results from the total. Well, Squid is undergoing a very specific time. It's an important operation for us. We believe in Squid and it offers us many important assets. This includes a large base of influencers and a very interesting list of blue-chip clients. Just a few names. They have Wella, PepsiCo and AliExpress, which are very interesting clients. This is a high-performance technology platform that's also automated serving both small, medium-sized and large clients. So very interesting assets there.

Now what's still to happen to Squid is the realization of the synergies of this product with our LWSA commerce sellers, which was our theory or our thesis when we acquired the company. This has been occurring, but at a much slower pace than what we expected. And obviously, this had an impact on the monetization curve that we expected when we acquired the company. So since Q4 2023, we are affecting a deep sales restructuring in Squid as well as an operational organization -- organizational restructuring of Squid, monetizing our sales contracts, increasing our sales, revenue and restructuring the organization and cost structure.

For example, the increase of one-off costs, which took place in the first quarter of this year, including the termination of contracts, layoffs and so on and so forth, which did have an impact on our bottom line. But ultimately, what we want is to have a structure that will allow us to operate a higher level of revenue with lower costs, allowing the company to operate sustainably. So despite the short- and medium-term negative impacts, once that restructuring period ends, Squid will be better prepared to grow sustainably. This will be the result of what we're doing right now.

So at the time of change in this operation, but it's a necessary time, we will continue to seek the realization of synergies. We'll continue to invest, as I said earlier, on supporting this operation, so that those synergies might be realized and so that we can monetize all of these assets this company offers.

So this is the scenario. And it's important to offer clarity about this company to the market. And with that, I think we can shed light on what's going on with this, which, again, is an important operation for us, one we really believe in. And so now and it's all in the clear.

With that, I'd like to turn over to our CFO, Rafael Chamas.

[Rafael Chamas Alves, executive]

Thank you so much. Thank you, Fernando. Good morning, everyone.

Moving on then to Slide 12. I A little bit of our overview on our net revenue broken down by segments. Fernando has already talked a little bit about what makes up these figures and also including Squid, which we'll talk a little bit more further. So the consolidated result was BRL 320 million, up 6% year-over-year. Broken down by business, our commerce business is growing by 9% and our BeOnline/SaaS business by 1%. There is a decrease -- a seasonal decrease in Q1 versus Q4, which is obviously taking place in the commerce business, seeing as Q4 includes the holiday season, so Q4 tends to be a seasonally stronger period, which is why we see this decrease of BRL 27 million, all in the commerce business. So we end the period at BRL 217 million revenue.

Moving on to Slide 13. We have our gross margin and gross profit. So a growth that's correlated to what we had in revenue -- on the revenue side, ending the period with BRL 152 million, up 7% from 1 year ago. And as you can see on the graph on the right-hand side, the M&A shifts or the M&A moves have brought shifts in our EBITDA curves, but not our margin. So the margins have stood at constant levels despite our M&As. And we've had increases in operational costs for the company, which has provided an operational leverage. So we ended the period with a gross margin of 47.6%, 52.4% of which come from our commerce operation and 37.5% from our BeOnline/SaaS operation.

On to Slide 14, we talk about our EBITDA. So we ended Q1 with a BRL 61 billion EBITDA, a 19% margin. So a significant increase, 21% higher than Q1 and it's also important to say that this increase can be seen in both sides of the business, both our commerce operations and our BeOnline operations. So on the BeOnline side, we saw a 29% increase ending the quarter with BRL 28 billion. So a significant increase since the beginning of 2023. And our commerce operation 15% higher in the period of 15.1%. We end this window with 32.6% EBITDA on the commerce side.

On to Slide 15, we have a snapshot of the consolidated performance during this period. Fernando talked about this in the last quarter, giving us a very clear picture of our performance. I just wanted to show you the history of what the company is excluding the results of Squid. And what we can see is that the company has had a very positive margin development. So since Q1 2022, we bring the company from 14.3%, and you can see the impact of Squid in the first quarter -- third quarter of '23, we bring the company to 19.8%. And excluding Squid in '24, bringing it up to 22.5%. So the company is focused on improving its profitability. And the entire action plan that we've developed is to bring it to a more sustainable growth level, but it's also important to show that at the core of the company, in its other operations, we've been able to grow and grow in a very sustainable way. There's been a healthy increase in revenue and profitability as a consequence in the company's other operations.

So moving on to Slide 16. We have our net profit. Fernando had already mentioned our growth from BRL 6.5 million last year to 24.5% this quarter with a 7.6% net margin, which is a result of our profitability. I showed you our increase in EBITDA to BRL 6 million this quarter, but there are other elements playing into this.

And I will give you a bit more detail. The improved financial expenses with the advance of receivables. This is what finances our payment service. And as we've explained in the last quarter, with the definition of our earnouts, the results by remeasurements tend to decrease is what we call the adjustment of our earn-out to present value. And we had an actual tax rate this quarter coming down because of our efficient, which shows the profit leverage that we enjoy. It's important to say, as I mentioned in our last conference about the company's asset because of the goodwill related to our acquisitions, which represents about BRL 800 million in cash, but we are not seeing the effects of that tax asset yet. That asset will be enjoyed by the company once we begin to incorporate the other companies we've acquired, which should begin over the course of the second half of this year.

So the decrease in this actual tax rate has to do with the effectiveness of our operations, more specifically relative to tax incentive Lei do Bem or the good law.

On Slide 17, I show you our performance over time since Q1 '22, which is important to understand the group's cash generation. So in gray, we have our EBITDA, you see the EBITDA growing significantly over the course of these 2 years, which is the period we're looking at. Since Q1 2022, we've virtually doubled our EBITDA from 32.1% in Q1 '22 to 61% in Q1 '24, up nearly BRL 30 million and another 2 very important components when we think about the operational cash generation, in this case, excluding Texas, is our CapEx and our financial expenses.

Our CapEx has been decreasing significantly over time when we compare it to our net expenses. The company has run at nearly 12% CapEx, and we're now bringing it closer to 7.5%. So the company is requiring less investment, and this has to do with a commerce-focused operation, which requires less investment. And another very important point is our financial expenses. The metrics we're offering here is financial expenses over TPV, which is the metrics that best translate the need of cash events to obtain working capital.

In 2020, it came close to 12%. And I've always mentioned that a sustainable level would be around 7% -- 0.7%. And we've been reducing that to 0.6% this quarter. And this shows the company's profit profile going up and consequently, its cash generation profile evolving as well.

On to Slide 18, we now have our cash position, which ended at BRL 1.126 billion, neither the company has no debt to settle, a very healthy cash balance with BRL 1 billion in net cash, our earn-outs stand at BRL 762 million. So the company's net cash is BRL 289 million. That's where we ended Q1 2024. So this is essentially it.

With that, we move on to our Q&A session. Thank you.

[Operator]

I'd like to remind you that our questions should be submitted using the Q&A button at the bottom side of your screen. As standard practice, your name will be called so you can ask your question live. Our first question comes from Andre Salles with UBS.

[Andre Salles, analyst]

I have 2 from my side. The reported position of the company seems to have been impacted by expenses with the restructuring expenses. We understand that much of that has come from Squid, but we also saw another restructuring move from the company with Bagy. My question is how widespread is this restructuring project across the company?

And my second question also is relative to your margins, but from a different perspective. I think you showed really well the recovery in consolidated margins. Now if we could talk a little bit about your margins with e-commerce, in addition to Squid, what other aspects should we monitor to understand this growing margins that you guys enjoy.

[Rafael Chamas Alves, executive]

Thank you for your question Andre. This is Rafael speaking. To your first point, in restructuring, obviously, what's impacting us the most is with Squid. There are obviously costs with contract termination. So yes, there's that. But structurally, that's only where we're seeing that. You mentioned bagging, but what we see in Bagy is exactly the opposite.

What we had was growth of nearly 100% with Bagy. We're seeing leveraging profitability. So the entire gains in synergy with this operation specifically and the vast majority of all the others is because of operational synergy and not because of layoffs or contract terminations. We have not reduced our manpower. We have not been squeezing growth. We truly believe in sustainable growth, which is based on operational synergies. So whenever we can see more significant termination costs is with Squid.

And this takes me to your second question, which is the trend for our margins in the other e-commerce operations. I showed you in one of my slides, the consolidated margins, excluding Squid, but the same can be said to our commerce operations. If we look at commerce, excluding Squid, there's substantial growth and substantial margin growth as well.

Looking at Commerce, excluding Squid, we see an increase of nearly 2 percentage points. So we continue to see the expansion of our margins in the business. And what we see with Squid, that goes to nearly 20% if we exclude Squid from that level. So that means we've outgrown the industry.

Of course, there's still potential to do even more and realize even more synergies, but that will not be because of restructuring, but by gains and synergies because of the substantial strategy to regroup the company in large business units, but we tend to tackle that in terms of being better poised to realize synergies. So obviously, we have more synergies to realize. But the restructuring aspect is a result of the group that's more solid now. That was very clear, Chamas. Thank you for the details. I think that I mentioned Bagy only because the fact that you discontinue the app. But it's clear to me that it was a one-off effect and that most of the change comes from Squid.

[Operator]

Our second question comes from Marcelo Santos with JPMorgan.

[Marcelo Santos, analyst]

I have 2 as well. On the margin issue, I'd like to focus a little bit on the BeOnline/SaaS, where margins were really strong, 27% the adjusted EBITDA margin. And I remember that this used to be between 22% and 24% in normalized terms. So I'd like to understand the strong performance of this business and whether this is something we should think of as a new level? Or was it characteristic of this one-off period?

And my second question, you mentioned about Squid that after restructuring, the volume should be smaller. I'd like to understand whether you were cutting contracts focusing on a specific profile of clients. Is this a change in focus? Or is this just a different way of recognizing your revenue in accounting terms?

[Higor de Araújo Franco, executive]

Marcelo. This is Higor. I will take your BeOnline question first, and I'll turn over to Mr. Gil, who will talk about Squid more specifically. Well, let me explain to you and the others on the call, the expansion in our BeOnline business, which naturally calls your attention. We have been talking for a while about our plans with this operation to monetize it a little bit better. This is a plan that has been underway for over a year, and ultimately, what we see in this quarter is a little bit of the result of this strategy. But naturally, we have to be a little bit cautious when we look at this because ultimately, these variations over the quarter, just as I mentioned last quarter as well, these fluctuations are normal, but I'd rather -- we focus and pay closer attention to the trend of these margins. This is a business with growing margins and our plan to restructure the contracts and terminate contracts that are not beneficial to the contract is still in place.

And for as long as we see room to optimize the operation that way. That's what we will do, Marcelo. So I can tell you that this plan still hasn't reached its end. So if we do not normalize the margins for the last quarter, which had one-off change because of a contract termination, we would see that last year, the normalized margin was around 25%. So we have been on a constant trend of growing margins with this business. And I still haven't -- I still can't see a plateau for it. So without offering any guidance, what I can tell you is that, our plan is still in place. It's still underway, and we still see room to monetize this operation. That's essentially it, Marcelo.

[Alessandro Gil, executive]

Hi Marcelo. This is Alessandro Gil speaking. Thank you for your question. In essence, what's going on is we've been reviewing not necessarily the profile of our clients. We're still serving blue-chip clients in the large brands. What we're reviewing is the quality of our contracts and the monetization of them so that we can have a healthier operation. And there's also the reorganization process for the entire company, not only in terms of product, but also in terms of management, so that we can realize potential synergies that we've mapped out in-house.

So what we've done essentially is to look at contracts that were not positive for the company and focused on the healthier contracts. And then also look at the structure, so that we make it as appropriate for this time in the company as possible so that we can grow in a more -- in a healthier way, actually.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Lucca Brendim with Bank of America.

[Lucca Brendim, analyst]

I have 2 as well. Well, first of all, I'd like to ask you to go a little bit into more detail about the pricing of your acquisitions. Is everything been calculated? Is there still room to grow? And where do you see that room, if that's the case?

And second, I wanted to understand a little bit the working capital and prepayment dynamics. This quarter, we saw a decrease in the prepayment dynamics, but there was also an increase in working capital -- a deterioration in your working capital. So I just wanted to understand how that trend will look -- what that trend will look like moving forward? Should we expect any change?

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

Thank you, Lucca. Well, I'll take your first question and then turn it over to Rafael. As for pricing, we understand that there is still room. We've done some -- we've taken some steps in tray and bang, we understand that Locaweb is a company that's been evolving with your products, investing and improving its product and adding new features and hasn't been able to capture a value that's compatible to what it's offered its clients.

On the other hand, it's not easy to capture that in large sums because you have your contracts with your clients that would make us vulnerable to competition. So what we've learned over the past 10 months in terms of pricing or repricing is that, that should be done in small steps, baby steps really in a small or slow and steady way. So I'd say that there's a long path ahead of us, but we'll tread that path in small steps. So it's not just with [ Ring ], there are other products where we can capture more value. Of course, [ Ring ] is an important product where we see a lot of room in terms of lead generation. So this will last a long time, and we will take slow and steady steps, but ultimately generate a lot of value to the company.

[Rafael Chamas Alves, executive]

Lucca, this is now Rafael speaking again. This is a very important question about prepayment and working capital. So what happened this quarter when we look at the indirect cash flow, which was working capital cash burn was very much one-off. There's no structural change or any change in the trend or the structure of how we organize payments. What happened was, as I showed you in one of our graphs, our anticipation of receivables was lower and also our expenses with that was lower, below what we usually see, the BRL 1.6 billion level in TPV is usually BRL 1.7 billion.

What happened was we needed to advance less receivables because of our advanced payments trend where we had more cash at the end of the year, so we needed to advance less cash. So because of the increased accounts receivable, we needed more cash. But again, we need to say this was one-off. There's no structural change. And this was because of a lower financial expense that we had ultimately.

[Lucca Brendim, analyst]

Yes, that was extremely clear. Thank you so much for your answer.

[Operator]

We'd like to ask the audience if anyone else has a question. Well, with no further questions, this concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn over to the CEO again for his final remarks.

Mr. Cirne, you may proceed.

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

I'd like to thank everyone for your questions. Our associates, our clients and the entire market, which has supported Locaweb in the first quarter of 2024. I think the questions were very clear. We are very much focused on profitability, working diligently on this fourth phase that we are stepping into where we will continue to ensure profitability and also work to increase and enhance our growth. Thank you so much, everyone, and we see you on our next conference.

[Operator]

LWSA's Q1 2024 Earnings Conference has now concluded. Thank you so much for joining us, and have a great day.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]